50% bonus on overseas shopping transactions in selected merchant categories for the next 7 days

If like us you’re an OCBC Titanium Rewards credit card holder in Singapore you may have received an email or SMS yesterday relating to their latest promotion, which entitles you to earn 6 miles per dollar spent on overseas shopping transactions.

I was certain having touched down in Japan yesterday evening on a work trip that some form of OCBC geo-surveillance had been tagged to my phone but apparently no ‘big brother’ nonsense as Eddie confirmed he received the exact same offer while lying on the couch back in Singapore.

We wouldn’t normally focus on targeted offers but given that we were both included for this one leads us to (quite unscientifically) suppose that it’s relatively widely available.

The Details

If you’re one of the lucky ones to have been targeted for the offer you’ll have received something like this to confirm it:

To clarify you must have been targeted to be eligible. As you may know from our review of the OCBC Titanium Rewards cards you’ll regularly earn 10 OCBC Dollars (4 miles) per S$1 spent on shopping transactions in Singapore or overseas.

Here a 50% bonus is applied for qualifying overseas transactions completed between now and 22nd June 2018, awarding 15 OCBC Dollars (6 miles) per S$1 spent in the qualifying MCC categories, which are as follows:

MCC 5311: Department Stores

MCC 5699: Miscellaneous Apparel and Accessory Shops

MCC 5611: Men’s and Boys’ Clothing and Accessories Stores

MCC 5621: Women’s Ready to Wear Stores

MCC 5631: Women’s Accessory and Speciality Stores

MCC 5641: Children’s and Infants’ Wear Stores

MCC 5651: Family Clothing Stores

MCC 5661: Shoe Stores

MCC 5691: Men’s and Women’s Clothing Stores

Note that there are a couple of notable exceptions compared with the OCBC TR standard 4 miles per S$1 offering:

MCC 5732: Electronics Stores

MCC 5045: Computers, Peripherals, and Software

These last two categories, which normally earn 10 OCBC Dollars (4mpd) in Singapore and overseas, are not eligible for this promotion and will continue to earn 4mpd overseas even if you’re targeted for this offer – not 6mpd.

Your Cap is Unaffected

One additional perk relating to this offer is that the spending does not count towards your annual cap of 120,000 OCBC$ (48,000 miles) per card on promotional transactions. We clarified this with OCBC directly and they confirmed it.

That means no concerns about participating in this offer if you’re already reached the cap on one or both your Titanium Rewards card(s).

Summary

If you’ve been targeted for this offer it’s another good option if you’re travelling over the next week and aren’t eligible for the 8mpd on Citi Apple Pay offer (though remember only the Citi Rewards card is offering that rate for overseas Apple Pay transactions).

Even if you do also hold the Citi Rewards card this offer could prove useful at overseas merchants not accepting Apple Pay / contactless payment but whose business categories fall into one of the above MCC codes.

Be careful to note two of the usual categories for OCBC bonus miles are excluded from this offer. Also don’t confuse this with the regular 4mpd earning rate for using the OCBC Titanium Rewards card for mobile payment transactions like Apple Pay and Samsung Pay, you can’t ‘double dip’ with these transactions and earn twice – 6mpd is the cap in this case even if you use mobile payment.

Unfortunately there’s no way we know of in Singapore (though if your travels take you to the USA you can use the Visa Supplier Locator to search the MCC of specific businesses there).

The downside with that is that the OCBC TR is a MasterCard and yes, you guessed it, they don’t necessarily categorise the same merchant with the same MCC code as Visa!

You certainly don’t want to end up earning 0.4 miles per dollar on your overseas shopping instead of 6mpd but to some extent you always take the MCC risk with this card. It’s the main reason I actually only use it for mobile payments and (until the end of June) Mileslife.

Thanks for the reply, Andrew.. It’s a bit both sad and odd though, that this being the case, that OCBC specifically tells everyone that it has to be these MCC numbers, but there’s no published list of who’s who and what numbers who has..?

I agree with you that MilesLife is best (and past promos like with Ikea, leaves no doubt).. but even as OCBC themselves has stated, the neither DFS or KrisShop are considered department stores.. then imagine how disappointmentes one would be after buying a S$50,000 watch at DFS, and thinking that he/she was going to earn 300,000 miles for that.. and then it’s not?!

Has anyone sought to reach out with OCBC on this? Can they offer some clarity?

Absolutely agree Ken, the same issue arises with the Citi Rewards card MCC categories too. I doubt the card issuers are keen to ‘clarify’ which merchants are and aren’t included – that would make it too easy!

Also I believe the banks genuinely don’t want to commit themselves as the MCC codes are subject to change (apparently!), and are decided by the network operator (e.g. Visa, MasterCard) not the merchant or the banks (though the merchant should be informed which MCC they have been assigned by each network operator when they first apply to accept credit card payment). Most merchants probably think this information is of no relevance to consumers and so neither ‘advertise’ it nor inform their front line staff.

The regulars over at the Hardwarezone forums have a crowd-sourced spreadsheet going which I believe is generated largely by trial and error over the years, if you haven’t seen it it’s very useful for Singapore retailers but not much use for overseas as you alluded to earlier.